


Surak’s for the F*cking Birds

by iimpavid



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Star Trek: AOS, Starfleet Academy, Therapy, Vulcan, Vulcan au, bad therapists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 06:40:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12625365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid
Summary: aka the one where Bones is Vulcan





	Surak’s for the F*cking Birds

**Author's Note:**

> This was an experiment to see what would happen to my favorite doctor's character if he were Vulcan. It didn't pan out the way I wanted it to but now y'all have to endure it anyway.

When his family uproots to Vulcan during his third year of college, Leonard is sixteen and generally considered underprepared for a proper Vulcan education. This does nothing to dissuade him from his diligent study of various species’ anatomy and physiology, and diagnostic medicine— it only serves to earn him somewhat fewer friends than he had on earth.

 

But then such frivolous interpersonal reactions are illogical, aren’t they, so what’s the point in having them? (He recognizes that this is his being what Geoffrey would describe as “salty” and has no desire to stop himself from feeling it, expressing it.)  
  


He comms his friends biweekly.  _Like clockwork_ , as Meredith is fond of saying.

 

It seems that university gossip hasn’t noticed much of his absence, continuing its operatic drama— his former astrophysics professor is still pursuing the affections of the Dean of Medicine of the local hospital; 37% of all RAs still allow their charges to indulge in illegal and/or forbidden recreation by ensuring their own plausible deniability; Meredith and Geoffrey are being “slowly devoured” by their residencies and fear for their lives when faced with their advisors’ disappointment, despite any reassurances they are provided with. And, absurdly, they still waste energy worrying about him.

 

Geoffrey plays it closer to the vest, leaving more messages than usual and sending along the occasional care package of medical antiques that Leonard has no business owning but enjoys studying and displaying nonetheless. They make for pleasant decoration. They don’t talk about it. This is the done thing among terran males, it seems, and it suits Leonard just fine.

 

Meredith vocalizes her concern. “You’re gonna end up the best sawbones that planet’s ever seen, but that doesn’t mean much if you’re lonely,” she tells him, eyebrows drawn. 

 

“On the contrary, such a prestigious title would be worthy of note in terran histories.” 

 

“Don’t be sarcastic when I’m worrying about you.” 

 

“Do not worry about me when I am fine.” 

 

She snorts, “What’s Ambassador Grayson’s kid always saying? “Fine has variable definitions and is unacceptable?” our human-y vagueness is rubbing off on you. And stop not using contractions. It’s not normal for you, Vulcan or not.”

  
“My family frequently socializes with Ambassador Grayson’s. I am not lonely, Meredith,” he says just to be contrary, really, “life on vulcan is… simply different.” 

  
“Yeah, okay, but do any of them go tree climbing with you in the middle of the night and make you do stupid shit like go skinny dipping when you know the lake’s fulla leeches? Whatabout cow tippin’? Or joyridin’ ina genuine twentieth century automobile?”

  
“There is neither sufficient foliage nor water here to allow for skinny dipping and T’khasi lacks both large herd animals and terran vehicles.” 

 

She spreads her arms in a gesture that says, “you’ve made my point for me,” and he isn’t sure how that makes him feel at all.

  
The things he misses about the American South are many.

 

The impossibly wet, hot summers that required a dehumidifier in every room of their house. The feeling of water settling from the air onto his bare arms in the hot sun that no one quite understood how he could be so comfortable with. The thick smell of antique shops, particularly the vanillin of their book sections, heady and intoxicating like the moonshine Meredith’s grandfather brewed never seemed to be. The companionship of his human friends who were always careful not to touch him without asking first but did in fact use touch to show affection. The arms slung around his shoulders, hands ruffling his hair, a side leaning into his telegraphing _amusementprideelationlove_  all at once right into the very katra of him.

 

He misses being touched.

 

He is also rather fond of contractions, particularly in the Southern American English dialect. They’re musical. On increasingly rare intentional occasions, or under sufficient duress wherein he forgets himself, the influence of being raised in Georgia is evident in his speech despite his parents’ best efforts.

__

Of course, his raising means that at some point in his life, some poor fool tells him that “ain’t” is not a real word.   
  


Of course, this means that the response he gives is properly Vulcan: “I assure you “ain’t” is a “real” word. It is spoken or written as an aspect of our shared language and understood to have coherent meaning and is, therefore, both real and a word. The contraction “ain’t” has been in use in Terran English dialects since it first appeared as a contraction for “am not” in the terran standard year 1618; there is much historical evidence of this. If perhaps you are referring to the validity of its use in formal language, then you are clearly expressing a bias which is not founded in any scientific accuracy. I urge you to reconsider your biases of language as “ain’t” and its associated dialects do not indicate intelligence, socioeconomic class, or other markers of status.”

__

  
His lack of emotional control is made apparent on the journey to Vulcan, which Leonard cannot think of as home.

 

It is not, as his parents had suspected, an adaptation to Terran life, but rather an inherent trait. Inborn. Genetic. A flaw in his code that can’t be rewritten, altered, removed. Not without changing the fundamental nature of who he is.

 

And isn’t that just a pretty philosophical conundrum to ponder while contemplating the myriad statistic about shuttle explosions, interstellar plagues, and the likelihood of surviving full-body irradiation and decompression

 

Leonard sits between his parents (they are not in the most secure part of the shuttlecraft; when it explodes they are in seats most likely to be incinerated) and listens to his heart rate climb in his ears. Breathes as much as he’s able.

 

Runs through the names of cranial nerves ( _olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal_ …); reciting Surak ( _Dakh'uh pthak. Nam-tor ri ret na'fan-kitok fa tu dakh pthak…_ ); trying to work through the equations for warp travel despite his comparatively low proficiency in quantum physics.

 

It is an unjustifiable panic.

 

His parents say nothing, but take him to a mind healer when they arrive, without pausing to pick up their luggage.

 

The experience is not an unpleasant one, not at first. Still rattled as he is from travel, the wave of calm is only jarring for a second as he acclimates his mind to the emotionless presence paying him a visit. From this removed perch he can see that not only did he come out of space travel unscathed but the odds of survival are, in general, favorable enough that he needn’t have worried in the first place and with this knowledge there is no shame, only a sureness that next time, he will be able to control himself. 

 

Then, almost as imperceptibly as the healer had come to him, he’s alone in his head again and there is discussion about contacting his bondmate happening around him. Without him. Has been going quite amicably for some time– or as amicable as born-Vulcans seem to get.

 

The phrase “incomplete” rattles between his ears for a good, long while after they head– not home but what will pass for it now.   
__  
  


 

He doesn’t leave Vulcan until his twenties, when the VSA firmly denies him entrance, based on aptitude scores that are a hair too low and an emotional quotient that is unacceptably high; off the charts, to use a Terran idiom.

 

He doesn’t bother to tell the council to either live long or prosper– because he’s not a liar.

 

He hates space and he takes the first shuttle he can off-world using the Terranized version of his name– Leonard McCoy– and doesn’t think twice about doing it. He sits in his assigned seat for takeoff and landing, and spends no less than one hour thirty-seven minutes in the middle of the flight locked in the moderately-safer, windowless bathroom trying to meditate away whatever it is he’s feeling. 

 

 _Articulating emotions is for the fucking birds_.

 

It feels wonderful to let himself think that way.

__

  
He meets Jim Kirk at Starfleet Academy.

 

Specifically, he encounters Jim Kirk on the Academy’s grounds while sitting up a poplar tree and working on memorizing Starfleet’s command structure and protocols, drinking sweet tea from a reusable water bottle. There’s nearly no further medical training that he can be given, so when he is not in surgery or taking patients, he works through officer training and physical evaluations. It is not as intellectually-rigorous as a more ambitious path might be… and he’s enjoying every second of it.  
  


“So… I’m Jim,” the human says, bright eyed and radiating pleasant surprise at having nearly knocked another person out of the tree he decided to clamber up. Radiating a minor sun’s worth of heat– he’s been running and Leonard isn’t keen to find out who from.  
  


He blinks, startled, because cadets scrambling up trees does not usually happen during the day when the humans are sober. “The pronounceable Terran equivalent of my name’s Leonard,” he replies, because social moors aren’t entirely new to him. 

 

“That’s a terrible name.”

 

“It is that much worse in Vulcan,” Leonard assures him. “Who’re you runnin’ from, exactly?”

 

“I might have pissed off a junior instructor by demolishing his Intro to Battle Tactics lesson.” He shrugs, “Guy was an idiot. My sister and I were doing more complex strategy before puberty.”   
  


“Next time, try to test out before earning your instructor’s ire.” Clearly, this Jim needs unsolicited advice if he’s already infuriated another person to the point where he is fleeing for safety.  
  


Jim just grins and the grin makes Leonard shut off his PADD to conserve its battery life. This will take some time, he can tell. This one’s a talker.

 

Jim tells him, “My Vulcan’s okay. My sister is in the xenolinguistics club. Mostly to harass other students— she takes it as a personal challenge anytime someone might speak a language better than she does.” He shrugs, “See, they wouldn’t let me test out of the class first. I don’t have a formal education, never saw the point of finishing high school since I knew it all already– but man, you gotta have a name that isn’t Leonard.”  
  


“There are millions of names available in the world; I’m certain you’ll come up with one you think is suitable.”

__  
  


Vulcan dies. At least its death does not go unwitnessed.

 

Leonard ends up back in Georgia, in the sticky heat of summer, because Meredith ( _bless her heart_ , he thinks) tracks him down the second he hits ground. “You can have as much space as you need, but you’re not gonna live alone while you’re on bereavement,” she says, taking his duffel of personal items from him in the middle of the San Francisco spaceport. “I’ve still got my parents’ house in Peachtree— styling the hair of the rich an’ famous pays well enough I up and bought it.” 

 

“The only condition I have is that we drive.” He’s seen enough of upper atmospheres and low gravity conditions if he ever leaves the ground again it’ll be a miracle. 

 

She nods, tight spiral curls of her hair bouncing, “You got it. I’ve got every kind of audiobook you can imagine from Stephen Hawking to Stephen King, so you can take your pick. What’s this about your captain callin’ you “Bones” that I’ve heard?”

 

He sighs, unashamed to do it in the relative anonymity of the crowds around the baggage claim area, rakes a hand through his hair. “How th’hell do you know about that?”

 

“A good gossip never reveals her sources, Bones.” 

 

“I hate you and I hate Jim Kirk.”

 

Her grin is made entirely of sunshine.

  
The whole drive across North America they listen to trashy horror novels and the hum of the electric car in turn. Peachtree appears out of the hills and, while Leonard could note every small way in which the town has changed since his departure from it at 16, if it’d changed at all. He’s still certain it hasn’t. On the outskirts a three story hotel still stands and beside it a fast-food restaurant, garishly neon, a marker of the city trying to encroach and failing. The two lane highway still bisects town, the miles of farmsteads and branching dirt roads leading up to the city proper like veins, lined with ancient elms and cottonwoods, mailboxes older than God. The general store’s had a facelift, painted a slightly fresher shade of cream and maroon. The video store is still being picketed by the same set of six churchgoers for selling pornography; the churchgoers are twelve years older now.

 

Meredith’s familial home is still surrounded by a picket fence, but the garden is gutted. He looks to her for an explanation and, without his even having to twitch a facial muscle, she understands and explains, “There was a while after we moved to the southwest that other people lived here. They put in a damn rock garden, so now that this place’s mine again I’m in the process of reinstatin’ a proper vegetable patch.” And she doesn’t say another thing until she unlocks the front door (some things have changed, then, once upon a time the door didn’t have a lock at all) and walking into the foyer, expecting him to follow. “They kept the trees in the back, if you’ve got a hankerin’ for peaches.”   
  


“You sound like your mother,” he comments on her turn of phrase, aching because he knows he never did take after his parents in much aside from his outward appearance. His father’s height and general Vulcanoid appearance, his mother’s blue eyes and tendency to freckle.  
  


“That’s what folks keep tellin’ me,” she calls from the kitchen. “Geoffrey’s comin’ down from Iceland in a week or so, too. We’re gonna have this house in great shape by the end of the summer.”   
  


Leonard can hear her rummaging in the refrigerator and, suddenly, he is more tired than he has ever been. He can say this with objective surety, as he has never experienced anything like the last several weeks. Never been Chief Medical Officer on a starship, held said post during what nearly amounted to a war against a time-traveling Romulan, continued to serve his galactic duty after experiencing the destruction of his homeworld and loss of his entire bloodline.   
  


He toes out of his boots and closes the front door behind him, walks into the sunken living room to sit down on the overstuffed floral print couch. It lacks the doilies on the arms that Meredith’s mother was fond of— likely her new residence in Tennessee has them, as Meredith always believed they were useless. The throw pillows don’t match, either, being made of some thick, plush faux fur where the couch is cream and patterned with roses.  
  


Leonard’s shoulders ache, radiating down into his elbows, his hands. He picks up one of the pillows, looks at the new, greenish scar tissue formed across the palm and fingers of his right hand, stark against the brown fur. The tricorder he broke when Vulcan vanished had done that— the electricity and shards of glass and plasteel; dermal regeneration units had been put to better use shortly thereafter, leaving him to heal in the natural way. He flexes his hand, watching the shiny scars pull at his skin in ways that want to limit his mobility. It will take work to break it, to restore the same nimble quality that had had him performing delicate surgeries as early as Terran law would permit.

 

He’s grateful he doesn’t tremble. There are small mercies left in the universe.

 

The cicadas are buzzing loudly enough that he can hear them indoors. He suspects Meredith can, too, with her human ears. When they were children, she always remarked on the din they caused and their sudden silences would scare her as if they were forewarning of something evil on the horizon.

 

There had been so much noise before T’khasi had collapsed into a void and after it, silence.  
  


The urge to press his face to the pillow, to curl up on the couch around it and not move for an undefined amount of time, seizes him. Self-soothing is a mechanism developed in early childhood by most sentient species, though Bones knows that for Vulcans, especially adults, it does not take this form. Should not take this form. 

 

Rarely have his methods of coping with emotion taken on the forms used by other members of his species. Though statistically he is now much less of an outlier than he was previously, given that his people are less than one hundred thousand in number.  
  


_There is no should, only what is._

  
He wraps himself around the pillow and screams into it.  
__

  
The mind healer he visits up the coast is unfazed by his coping mechanisms; she has, according to her credentials, trained in the psychology of a variety of species outside her own. 

 

She has not undergone Kolinhar. It shows in her methods. 

 

Leonard is not certain of her effectiveness and does his best to reserve judgement.   
  


She says to him, “You may not follow c’thia in the same way that the majority of Vulcans do, but if it grants you peace, it would be illogical for it to distress you.”   
  


That’s the catch. He isn’t at peace. There is no calm in his body, mind, katra. No rest. He can’t even be still enough to meditate.  
  


He tells her this. She guides him through meditation ( _like a child_ , he thinks, bitter at his perception of his own incompetence) and, once he masters his pride and gets something resembling a rein on his fear, they wade through his emotions together. There is no trace of her own feelings, leaving him to unpack every last one ( _the survivor’s guilt, the irrational terror, the impotent rage, the repugnant relief that he was not on T’khasi when it was destroyed_ ) and lay them out before her to be examined, understood, sorted, and put away until they are needed again. He finds himself stuck most often at the understanding portion of this process. It is slow going.  
  


Between this and the soft pillows of Meredith’s couch, the garden that he works in to pass the time, the backlog of medical journals he’s getting caught up on, the time he makes to bother Jim and Spock via comm there is no peace to be found.

__

 

The option to sever ties with his memories of Vulcan’s destruction— and everything he lost with it— is put on the table. Bones stares at the healer. It hadn’t occurred to him to do such a thing. 

 

“It is often the case that Vulcan children who are raised in other cultures find themselves forming extraneous attachments to memories and while this is rarely a handicap in the event of trauma these attachments can become debilitating. However, memory can be altered so as to alleviate pain. You would possess knowledge of the events, but they would be… more distant. You would no longer have nightmares. You would be able to speak about the destruction of Vulcan without experiencing any distress.”  
  


Leonard blinks slowly, first his inner eyelid then outer. It takes a ten count for him to know he can speak evenly.

 

“Allow me to educate you on a matter of nature versus nurture, a Terran argument older than your field of study. This attachment to my life experience and my recently-deceased loved ones has not been  _taught_  to me. It is not a learned behavior caused by too much time living among humans or a bad habit like cussing picked up from those kids who live on the wrong side of the galactic tracks ‘cause their daddy works in a coal mine and their mama’s a stripper and they can’t afford soap. It is innate, inherited, handed down through mitochondrial DNA and sheer, dumb luck. This stupid, miserable, aching tendency toward fear and rage and anguish and joy and love is natural and it is mine.”

 

He takes a breath and the next sentence out of his mouth is said with a drawl the likes of which would have made his Georgia born-and-bred grandmother proud. “So why don’t you and your miniature kolinahr go fuck yourselves, sweetheart?”

 

He spends the rest of the day at the beach throwing starfish from the shore back into the safety of the deep where they belong.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr.](https://papermoon-cardboardsea.tumblr.com/) [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/iimpavid)


End file.
